When Melinda Welch, 25, was six years old, she went shopping for a swimsuit and came home with a camera.

“It was a promotion where the store was giving away a free camera of some sort with a swimsuit purchase. I remember that the swimsuit was hideous, but I didn’t care because I got a free camera,” she recalls.

Melinda uses a twins-lens reflex camera for a detail shot of a tree.

Sadly, the camera didn’t actually work but her parents quickly gave Melinda an old model they had on hand and her love of photography developed quickly. Later, when she was a teenager, Melinda also took photography classes at the Art Academy, and it would have seemed that her future profession was etched in black and white.

However, Melinda, now a resident of Walnut Hills, wanted to explore other options, first thinking about teaching and then about entering the ministry. She actually earned a degree in theology before a crisis of “what do I really want to be when I grow up?” hit her full force.

“In school, I had learned Greek in order to read the New Testament in that language, and I began realizing that the way many translations choose to delineate the text today isn’t what the earlier versions actually said. Some of the translations defining a narrower role for women didn’t seem justified to me if translated honestly. I had been going to a school that espoused very conservative translations, and I realized that I didn’t believe this stuff. I went ahead and finished my degree in 2003, but then I had to really decide what I wanted to do with my life,” Melinda says.

Almost as therapy, Melinda took up the camera again as a way to acquire insight into her own life, beliefs and dreams. “I see photography as a way of communicating feelings, things that can’t be spoken, things on a deeper level with myself and with others. At the time, it seemed my only avenue for doing so -- especially since I can’t paint,” she quips.

Melinda hasn’t put her camera down since, and in the fall of 2004, she enrolled in UC’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning as a fine-arts major in order to build her photography portfolio. She’s been amazed at the clarity -- and success -- she’s come to enjoy.

For instance, Melinda is currently included in a black-and-white photography exhibit at The Foundation Gallery located at 200 W. Fourth Street downtown. Eleven of her images are in the five-artist exhibit, and some have even sold. “But the best part is knowing that I am communicating, and people are emotionally responding to the images… unless, of course, it’s only my parents who are secretly buying them in order to support me,” she laughs.